I took furious notes as Leo continued speaking a mile a minute.
“Again. We need a coherent complaint to placate the client, but between us, I donotwant this lawsuit getting filed. His only bet at recovering anything is us coming up with a creative strategy to force a settlement. A judge is going to take one look at these emails and texts and laugh us out of court. Wecannotlitigate this.”
“Understood.”
I created a new client folder as a second email popped up with three sample complaints attached.
I opened the first one, written on behalf of the wife of a famous athlete who was suing the publisher of her memoir for breach of contract. The second complaint was for the founder of one of the most popular social media platforms. The third was for a legendary morning-show host who was suing the TV network for ageism.
All Leo’s clients.
I felt an unshakable wave of imposter syndrome.
It took all of ten minutes to read through Sterling’s documents. It seemed the only undisputed fact was that the film fund had approached Sterling to make an investment in a slate of four movies with budgets of $5 million each for a total of $20 million. He’d wired the money in one lump sum. Other than that, it didn’t look like he received any formal agreement papering the investment or copies of the movie budgets, and it didn’t even look like he’d asked for them. It was going to be difficult to meet the minimum standard for a bona fide complaint with such sparse supporting facts.
I quickly summarized the emails and texts into a coherent memo, then began carefully reading each sample complaint and researching breach-of-contract cases with similar fact patterns. There weren’t any.
I went to bed late and woke up early. I hadn’t seen Charlie in almost a week. I was already used to having someone I could say anything to inside our office bubble. I texted him as I got off the subway to see if hewanted Joe’s and was disappointed when he responded he was out the whole week for depositions somewhere in the Midwest. He promised to send tallies of oversized SUVs and American flags.
The meeting with Sterling was scheduled for one o’clock the next day on Greene Street in SoHo. A black car would pick me up from the office at noon.
I arrived a few minutes early and buzzed the top floor of the loft-style building. There was no concierge, but an elevator attendant appeared a few seconds later and scanned a key to the penthouse. The elevator door opened directly onto a massive loft with garage-style windows and a woman sitting behind an Apple monitor.
“Hi, I’m Samantha DeFiore from Abramson & Klein. I’m here to meet with Sterling Solomon.”
“Oh, hi, Samantha. I’m Grace. Sterling is just wrapping a call, but let’s head to the meeting space, and he’ll be over in a few.”
I settled into a camel-colored leather swivel chair and powered up my MacBook to review my notes.
Sterling was nothing like I imagined. He didn’t look more than twenty-five. He was barely taller than me and wearing ultrafitted black jeans, an oversized black denim jacket, and green sneakers.
He extended a hand. “Sterling. Thanks for coming by. I know we have real work to do here, so let’s dive in.”
I handed Sterling a copy of the outline I prepared.
“Leo sent over the documents,” I began, trying to sound confident, though I was painfully aware I was going into this meeting completely solo and transparently inexperienced. I needed to stick to the facts. If he asked about strategy, I’d have to punt to Leo.
Sterling grinned. “Leo is fucking awesome. If he was on my team when these assholes asked me to invest in their bullshit movies, I wouldn’t be in this position. I guess live and learn, right?”
The logline to the story of my life,I thought,only my lessons hadn’t cost $20 million.
“We’re going to do everything we can to minimize your exposure,” I assured him. “I think it would be helpful to go over a few preliminaries. Your background is in tech, right?”
An hour later, I had a pretty good idea of the picture I wanted to paint about Sterling’s decision to invest $20 million in a slate of art-house movies. In his own words, Sterling was generally bored day-trading tech stocks and needed to “switch it up.” His favorite pastime was going to the movies alone in the afternoon, and he was frustrated studios only seemed to be making big Marvel movies. The film fund that solicited him for money was represented by a shark of a Hollywood dealmaker who saw Sterling coming a mile away: a young tech guy with lots of cash and no experience in the movie business. Sterling thought he could be the guy to prop up smaller and more tasteful movies. There was zero transparency with respect to the financials. Unbeknownst to Sterling, the fund had already burned through an initial round of money from Dubai, then pivoted to Silicon Valley, where the wealthiest players were under thirty and eager to pay for celebrity access.
“As you know, the emails and texts aren’t a lot to go on. But I looked up the box office numbers for each movie, and they were actually pretty strong. The $5 million budgets should have been recouped from the sale of the movies and the box office numbers. But given how little information they gave you, I have a hunch the budgets were actually a lot more than $5 million. And if they took your money, then turned around and inflated the budgets, you would potentially have a fraud claim. And that’s a much more intimidating claim than breach of contract.”
“Itwasfraud! Those assholes stole my money. They can’t get away with it.”
I nodded sympathetically. “Just to confirm—you never saw copies of the budgets, right?”
“Nope.”
“Did you ask for them?”
“Nope.” Sterling continued doodling along the margins of his notepad. “But I heard that one of the guys paid himself a million-dollar producing fee and fucked off. No one even knows where he is.”
Sterling rubbed his jaw. He looked like a frustrated kid who lent another kid lunch money then found out they spent it on a new video game. Even though we were from completely different worlds, I felt how shitty the situation was. Sure, he was a trust-fund kid who burned through $20 million trying to make movies. He wasn’t relatable in theory. But wasn’t the point of being a lawyer to help someone who was wronged? It was clear who the bad guys were in this mess.
